Remember ‘Bambi Blair’? The doe-eyed fawn was conjured up by the Tories after 1994 to attack Labour’s new centrist leader. The approach clashed with those ‘Demon eyes’ posters. The Conservatives could not decide what we were meant to see if Blair’s mask slipped – a snarling extremist, or another grin like the one on the mask.
Labour is grappling with the same dilemma now as David Cameron enjoys his honeymoon with the voters. Of course, it is easier to attack extremists. Thus Blair’s first public charge against the new Opposition leader was that he wanted big cuts in public spending. And Ian McCartney said Cameron was just ‘putting a new gloss on the same old Tory policies’.
Yet one minister told me he was anxious about Cameron’s clever move to back Blair’s education reforms – an anxiety only somewhat relieved when the Tory leader made the tactical error of calling for across-the-board selection at 11, giving Blair at least one issue that his own party would side with him on.
While the despairing cry of ‘He has moved to the centre and stolen our policies’ does not sound like a vote-winner, it actually marks a victory. Because in our two-party, see-saw system, you only really win when you force your opponents around to your point of view. Margaret Thatcher triumphed when Labour accepted the right-to-buy, privatisation and curbs on unions.
So Labour triumphs when Cameron pays more lip-service than his predecessors to raising public spending; when he drops plans for health and education vouchers; and when he rejects racism and homophobia by declaring in his acceptance speech that he loves Britain as it is, not as it was. (Although on that last point, the Home Office is waiting with interest to see what the Tory stance will be the next time asylum flares up as an issue.)
If the country is now guaranteed tolerance and decent services no matter which party wins the next election, that is Labour’s success and the party should crow about it.
The first polls showed Cameron’s Conservatives picking up more votes from the Lib Dems than Labour. This is significant. If the official Opposition becomes less repellent, there are swathes of southern England that could abandon its flirtation with Charles Kennedy’s ‘real opposition’ and return to its true-blue roots. Coupled with the unwinding of the Iraq factor which helped the Lib Dems take seats from Labour last time, the third party faces a pincer movement which could halt its run of three successive election advances.
I like Jo Brand, not least because she is Crystal Palace FC’s leading celebrity fan. But I’m not sure about her rather laboured joke in the email dispatched to party members by Old Queen Street – ‘I’m Jo, a Labour supporter … David Cameron (Dave to his friends), an old Etonian distantly related to the Queen, has been elected leader of the Conservative Party. At last, it has dawned on Tory members that they need to be in touch with the reality of the modern world and the lives of the majority of British people!’ Even if Tony Blair wasn’t a public schoolboy himself, it might be wiser to let voters make up their own mind about whether a privileged background is a barrier to being a good PM.
When anti-war protestor Maya Evans was prosecuted for reading the names of dead soldiers outside parliament, the shadow home affairs minister Edward Garnier told Radio 4’s Any Questions?: ‘This is overkill. It makes the government look silly.’ He mocked the way that a bill designed to expel Brian Haw from Parliament Square had in fact left Haw as the only man entitled to protest in the vicinity.
As it happens, I’m on the side of Garnier and the 22 rebel Labour MPs who opposed the ban on unauthorised demonstrations within 1km of Westminster when it came before the Commons in February 2005.
But the Tories have hardly championed the freedom to protest. While 25 of their MPs opposed the demo ban, 26 sided with the government. Their front bencher in the debate, Dominic Grieve, set the tone by abstaining – having explained that he was not against an exclusion zone, only the proposals for its size and the notice period needed to stage a legal demo.
Note to David Cameron – if you’re going to support government legislation, you won’t have much credibility if you turn around and complain as soon as it takes effect.